Photo: Shared Source
It’s time for fresh crop Guates on the D-dub menu … I guess we’re a little biased, but our coffee lineup is looking pretty delicious these days 🤠
This lot of caturra and yellow bourbon comes from a producer named Benjamin Lopez, straight out of his farm El Aguacate, surrounded by peach, banana, and avocado trees. This farm is located 1,775 meters above sea level in San Antonio Huista, in Guatemala of course. How did Dapper & Wise get the privilege of buying and sharing Benjamin’s coffee each year? As with other coffees on our menu, that’s thanks to one of our importing partners, Shared Source, who met Benjamin through the ASIAST producer association. In fact, Benjamin’s father, Tadeo, was one of the first presidents of this association over 10 years ago.
Benjamin studied agriculture and previously worked for ANACAFE, which is Guatemala’s national coffee association. ANACAFE represents Guatemalan coffee farmers on a national and international level, provides services to farmers in the form of agricultural extension services, access to markets, and promotes Guatemalan coffee quality. With this impressive background, Benjamin definitely knows what he’s doing at El Aguacate, and it becomes obvious after the first sip of his delicious coffee. Here’s a little bit of information about how Benjamin processes his coffees:
Benjamin makes sure to depulp all the coffee that was picked before the end of the day, then sends it off to a tank for a 25 hour fermentation. Next step is what he calls a ‘reposo’, in which the coffee chills out under some cold water before washing off the now weakened mucilage layer. Once fully reposo-d (not a word btw), the coffee is washed clean to remove all the mucilage, leaving the sparkly clean parchment layer surrounding the coffee seed. What a great form to dry coffee in, and that’s exactly what Benjamin does next! Benjamin has a great way of doing so - on raised beds ✔️under mesh coverings ✔️slowly, over the course of 10-15 days ✔️raking the parchment around as needed to achieve a consistent process ✔️✔️✔️
We at D-dub love Guatemalan coffees for a handful of reasons, but one of the main reasons is the approachability and sessionability (also not a word) of these coffees. At their worst, Guatemalan coffees, in our humble opinion, are high quality. Reading that sentence back, I agree, it doesn’t make much sense, but here’s what I mean: Ask 10 people to describe their favorite kind of coffee. We’re gonna guess that the majority of those answers you’ll get will have something to do with dark roast or chocolatey notes (you know, “coffee-coffee”). And we’ll bet that these ‘coffee-coffees’ - delicious, creamy, chocolatey, maybe a lil roasty, maybe not - are the ones that most people will reach for to start their mornings. Solid, comforting, consistent, nostalgic, etc, etc. But we do not want to generalize an entire country, because there are some insanely high quality coffees coming out of Guatemala, and we think that this coffee from Benjamin Lopez lies somewhere in the middle - a reliable crowd pleaser with sweet sugar browning notes that remind us of fresh baked sugar cookies, hot chocolate like your grandma used to make, topped with marshmallows. Comforting, but elevated.
This will be our fifth year in a row sharing Benjamin’s coffee, and we couldn’t be more grateful.